About
55
Publications
21,676
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,722
Citations
Introduction
My main topic of interest is Quaternary and active deformation in subduction zones, particularly I am very motivated to understand the mechanical and kinematic interaction between upper plate faults and subduction megathrust. I am also involved in natural hazard assesment projects being Deputy Director of CIGIDEN (www.cigiden.cl)
Current institution
Publications
Publications (55)
Active deformation and landscape evolution in North Chilean forearc involve multiscale tectonic processes, such as crustal thickening causing orogenic‐scale uplift and faulting modulating the mountain‐front landscape. In the Central Depression, faults redirecting Quaternary drainages are poorly understood due to their subtle surface expressions and...
Boiling mud ponds, hot springs, and geysers are the scenic surface expression of rising thermal fluids, often emerging in clusters. The details on the spatial appearance and structural control of such geothermal objects as well as on the variability of their locations are rarely investigated, however. Here we use Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) to ac...
El Morro Mejillones (MM), una estructura ubicada en el norte de la Península
de Mejillones en la Región de Antofagasta, Chile, ha mostrado tener una de las
mayores tasas de alzamiento tectónico a o largo del margen convergente activo del
norte chileno; para estudios morfotectónicos, este sector resulta particularmente
interesante debido al amplio r...
In the world, the hazards of intense rainfall are recurrent and increasing. In addition, they are one of the natural hazards that cause the most severe damage to infrastructure and even cause deaths every year. Flow-type landslides are capable of develop in areas with different geomorphological, geological and climatic characteristics. In hyper-ari...
Seismic site amplification and seismic hazard maps are crucial inputs for decision making and risk evaluation in places where seismicity imposes a significant risk to human life and infrastructure. In this work, we propose a novel machine learning (ML) based methodology to integrate qualitative and quantitative data to map the degree of seismic amp...
Preserved remnants of fluvial activity in deserts constitute evidence for changing boundary conditions. The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is the global end-member for aridity, so the history of relict stream networks in this region is a record of how landscapes develop under extreme conditions. On Pampa de Tana in northern Chile (19.4°S), a seri...
The aim of obtaining a single scale for earthquake magnitudes has led many studies in the past to either develop relationships among various existing scales or develop an altogether new scale to represent a wide range of magnitudes on a single scale. Although a reliable and standardized estimation of earthquake size is a basic requirement for all t...
The relationship between hydrothermal fluids and fault development is studied through a petrographic analysis of faulted veins in an open-pit copper mine, Radomiro Tomic (RT), northern Chile. Brittle deformation in RT was initiated with the formation of veins, disrupting low-strain crystal-plastic deformation. Following cooling, shear fractures pro...
The Mw=8.8 Maule Earthquake of February 27, 2010, remotely triggered minor surface displacement along the Atacama Fault System in Northern Chile located 1500–1800 km from the epicenter. Here we present evidence that surface displacement events recorded by the IPOC (Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory in N-Chile) Creepmeter Array are related to ea...
Over long-term geological scales, the position and vertical movements of the coast are considered to be among the most important effects resulting from first-order plate tectonics interactions in the subduction zones. However, the relationship between short-term vertical deformation driven by earthquakes and long-term coastal uplift in the Andean s...
Subduction earthquakes are commonly regarded as the most significant seismic threat for South America. However, historic destructive earthquakes related to shallow crustal sources have occurred onshore where many important cities, capital towns and critical facilities are settled nearby faults, whose seismogenic capability is known or suspected. De...
The Mejillones Peninsula is thought to have one of the highest rates of tectonic uplift along the active convergent margin of northern Chile. We use exposure age dating from a flight of well-preserved marine terraces to determine the long-term tectonic history of the northern part of the Peninsula. Terrace ages suggest the area is comprised of disc...
En la Pampa Mejillones, en la península homónima, se observa un conjunto de líneas de paleocosta cuyo origen está ligado a un efecto de alzamiento de superficie y/o una caída del nivel relativo del mar. La presencia de paleocostas en una zona de alta actividad sísmica sugiere que el mecanismo de abandono podría ser producido por alzamiento cosísmic...
The Mejillones Peninsula is a promontory extending spectacularly from
the northern Chilean coastline. The peninsula is marked by well
preserved marine terraces extending from just above sea-level to greater
than 400 m. These staircased planar expressions result from a
combination of glacioeustatic sea-level fluctuation and tectonic uplift.
It has b...
We have undertaken the first paleoseismological study on an upper plate
fault in Chile. The selected structure was the Mejillones Fault, which
is marked by a conspicuous fault-scarp. Using cosmogenic 10Be
and OSL dating and detailed sedimentary logging of trenches, we have
constrained the abandonment of two alluvial surfaces by fault activity
at ca...
In order to understand how subduction earthquakes along the Nazca-South
America plate boundary affect upper plate faults in the coastal forearc
of northern Chile, we are developing the first detailed
paleoseismological study to characterize the Late Quaternary activity of
the Mejillones and Salar del Carmen faults, located around 40 km north
and 15...
Cited By (since 1996): 5, Export Date: 24 July 2012, Source: Scopus, doi: 10.1016/j.jsg.2011.03.004, Language of Original Document: English, Correspondence Address: Arriagada, C.; Departamento de Geología-Centro de Excelencia en Geotermia de Los Andes (CEGA-FONDAP), Universidad de Chile, Plaza Ercilla 803, Santiago, Chile; email: cearriag@cec.uchil...
The Chilean convergent margin is the locus of most of the largest subduction earthquakes recorded in history. Slip deficit along this plate boundary is absorbed by elastic deformation of the upper plate. Numerical models and geodetic data suggest a fully elastic behaviour of the overriding crust and that deformation is balanced between inter- and c...
The 2010 Maule earthquake was preceded by several decades of intense geological study of the Central and Southern Andes and 15 years of geodetic GPS monitoring of the South America-Nazca Plate boundary. With an excellent record of interseismic and coseismic deformation, and comprehensive description of upper plate regimes of shortening, vertical ax...
The western South American offshore is one of the major active convergent plate boundaries in the world, where the Nazca plate is subducting northeastward beneath the South American plate at a rate of about 84 mm/yr. Despite of this rapid plate convergence, the forearc region of western Andes does not seem to undergo large deformation at present. I...
Introduction The upper plate deformation in Northern Chile is mainly controlled by the subduction of the Nazca below the South-American plate. This process is responsible for the important seismicity that characterizes the continental margin of Northern Chile and Southern Peru. The generation of earthquakes is cyclic and its succession in time is k...
Convergent plate boundaries at continental margins belong to the tectonically most active areas on earth and are the potential source of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. While the bulk of strain accumulates along the subduction interface, significant hazardous deformation occurs by fault activity in the overriding crust. Abundant evidence for...
Understanding the long-term patterns of great earthquake rupture along a subduction zone provides a framework for assessing modern seismic hazard. However, evidence that can be used to infer the size and location of past earthquakes is typically erased by erosion after a few thousand years. Meter-scale cracks that cut the surface of coastal areas i...
After the November 14, 2007 Tocopilla earthquake in northern Chile, a local network of 20 short period seismic stations, 5 strong motion instruments, 6 GPS stations and 3 extensometers has been installed in the fault plane area between Tocopilla and Antofagasta by the German Task Force for earthquakes (GFZ Potsdam). The hydrogeology group of the TF...
This work documents fault activity and the Neogene's strain field in northern Chilean Coastal Cordillera. Fault activity is expressed a group of fault scarps and fault-bend fold scarps whose orientation defines three main domains WNW-ESE, N-S and NNW-SSE. The WNW-ESE and N-S faults show reverse kinematics, and NNW-SSE faults shows dextral-reverse k...
Overlying the only part of the South American continental crust that is in direct contact with the subducting Nazca Plate, the Coastal Cordillera of northern Chile and southern Peru should provide the most complete geological record of the coupling between the two plates. This record of coupling is exquisitely preserved in the hyperarid Atacama Des...
The western South American margin is one of the most active continental plate boundaries in the world. The ongoing convergence between the Nazca plate, or formerly the Farallon plate, and the South American plate produced the wide deformation belt of the Andes. In order to obtain more information about the active deformations in the central Andean...
The age of the uppermost emerged marine terrace in the Caldera-Bahía Inglesa area, located at 224±6 m a.s.l. is presented herein. The methodology applied is based on the exposure ages in clasts of quartz using cosmogenic 21Ne. The age obtained was 0.86±0.11 My. Three strong sealevel highstands corresponding to isotopic stages MIS 19 (780 ky), MIS 2...
Patterns of faulting in the northern Chilean forearc are consistent with modeled stress fields resulting from the subduction zone earthquake cycle. We define positive Coulomb stress change as encouraging normal faulting motion on steeply-dipping planes striking approximately parallel to the plate boundary, as shown by fault kinematic data collected...
[1] A 400-km-long seismic reflection profile (Andean Continental Research Project 1996 (ANCORP'96)) and integrated geophysical experiments (wide-angle seismology, passive seismology, gravity, and magnetotelluric depth sounding) across the central Andes (21°S) observed subduction of the Nazca plate under the South American continent. An east dipping...
Upper crustal strike-slip duplexes provide an excellent opportunity to address the fundamental question of fault zone development and strain partitioning in an evolving system. Detailed field mapping of the Mesozoic Atacama fault system in the Coastal Cordillera of Northern Chile documents the progressive development of second- and third-order faul...
The age of onset of hyperaridity in the Atacama Desert, Chile, which is
needed to validate geological and climatological concepts, has been
heretofore uncertain. Measurement of cosmogenic 21Ne in
clasts from erosion-sensitive sediment surfaces in northern Chile shows
that these surfaces have been barely affected by erosion since 25 Ma.
Surface expo...
The Coastal Cordillera of northern Chile is located in the hyperarid Atacama Desert and is situated over the interplate seismic zone of the Nazca-South America convergent plate boundary. The Coastal Cordillera is bounded to the west by a 1000 m high escarpment that plunges directly to the sea north of Iquique but to the south has a 1-5 km wide Plei...
The Salar del Carmen Fault is the most important strand of the Atacama Fault System exposed along the eastern border of the Sierra del Ancla. The younger slip event along this fault forms seven consecutive 8 km long north-south striking fault segments that cut Pliocene alluvial fans. The segments show a left stepping geometry, whose terminal parts...
The tectonic evolution of a continental magmatic arc that was active in the north Chilean Coastal Cordillera in Jurassic-Early Cretaceous times is described in order to show the relationship between arc deformation and plate convergence. During stage I (circa 195-155 Ma) a variety of structures formed at deep to shallow crustal levels, indicating s...
El Plutón de Cerro Cristales, de edad jurásica tardía-cretácica inferior, expuesto en la Cordillera de la Costa al sur de Antofagasta (24 -25ºS), presenta una zonación interna dada por un borde fuertemente foliado de composición dominantemente tonalítica, y un núcleo isotrópico de similar petrografía. La foliación que afecta al borde del plutón es...
Since the advent of plate-tectonic theory over 30 years ago(1,2), the geometries of subduction zones have been constrained mainly by the spatial distribution of earthquake hypocentres, known as Wadati-Benioff zones. This is due to the fact that, despite the existence of a wealth of shallow seismic reflection and refraction data, very few high-resol...
The active continental margin of Antofagasta, in Northern Chile, can be divided into three morphostructural domains. These are from east to west: Coastal Cordillera, coastal platform and Continental slope. The boundary between the Coastal Cordillera and coastal platform is the coastal scarp ca. 1.000 m high. The origin of this remarkable morphologi...
